Letter Recommendation Webs: Fill & Download for Free

My first mentor in graduate school was SO toxic.She would complain about students to other students and would talk openly about who was not competent. She once told me that she felt it was her responsibility to weed out the bad students —keep in mind that these were student who were ALREADY accepted into the PhD program by a committee. This had a strange impact on us because if she liked you, it almost felt like you passed some sort of test and deserved to be there. If she didn’t like you she made your life a living hell. So, you did everything you could to make her like you.She made semi-racist comments. She told a friend of mine that his accent made him sound stupid and that he should try to get rid of it. This was done in a group setting, as were all of her belittling comments.She asked me and other students to pick her up from her mechanic and take her home—on numerous occasions. On one occasion I picked her up from the body shop. On the way home she told me that someone had shot at her car overnight… It took me a whole year to figure out why !She pushed ethical research boundaries —wont go into that for legal reasons. But no student should ever have to decide between violating sacred ethical principles or pissing off a viper.She called me once on a Saturday night to ask if I could make her a graph for a project that I wasn’t even working on. And then she got mad when I told her I was out of town and didn’t bring my computer with me. The next week at our research meeting she gave the group a big lecture about being dedicated to research that was clearly intended for me.I also took one of her classes. She had us make a website for an organization that she ran —my PhD is in psychology, not web design. We were not supposed to be making websites! What an abuse of power….Midway through my first year we formed a sort of therapy group. Several times a week our Lab group would walk around town venting about how awful she was. One by one everyone in the lab quit. I stayed because I believed in the research that we were conducting. I arranged to collect data on my big project over the summer, but she used the participants I had setup for her own research project.When the next year started, new students were admitted to the lab. She started our first meeting by bad mouthing all the students that quit. She said they were weak and that not everyone is cut out for graduate work. Then, she proceeded to ask about my project. I reminded her that she used my participants and explained that data collection would commence shortly now that the semester started…she questioned my dedication to research. After the meeting, I confronted her about what she said about me and my former lab mates. She said that she was defending herself before the new students heard the rumors.I just could not believe that a woman in her 50s felt the need to do that… It was sad. And I just couldn’t work for someone that I didn’t respect anymore. Plus, she was making me miserable.The trouble was that if I changed mentors I had to justify why I was making the change to the university. And though it was not a secret that she was like this, it would have been detrimental to my career to burn that bridge because she was a semi-big name in my field. (Not surprisingly, she is well known for criticizing the work of a very famous researcher, not for contributing anything new.)I had also seen her blackball another student, let’s call the student Karen. Karen worked for this woman for four years and then quit to work with someone else because she was so abusive. Karen asked her for a letter of recommendation because it would’ve been strange not to have a letter recommendation from someone you worked with for years. The mentor agreed and then wrote Karen a terrible and damaging letter of recommendation… Karen got no job offers the first year she was on the job market because of this. The mentor sent Karen the letter she wrote her after she had sent them to everyone… Karen was mortified… She found another letter writer and almost immediately got a job .Anyways, I ended up switching to another line of research all together to escape this woman. Thankfully, I found an amazing mentor that taught me everything I know about how to be a great mentor. She challenged me, gave me opportunities, treated me and her other students with respect, and supported me wholeheartedly. The rest of my time in graduate school was lovely. I finished my PhD in a timely manner and was able to find a tenure-track position as a professor right out of graduate school .Unfortunately I still have to see the toxic “mentor” at conferences once a year, but hopefully she will retire soon and I will be able to fully close that awful chapter of my life.That said, I did learn a lot from this toxic person. I learned exactly the type of professor, researcher, and mentor I DON’T want to be!

You might want to look into getting an “Emotional Support Dog.” Your doctor can write you a letter recommending you have one to comfort you because of your anxiety. There is more info on the web and the legal benefits of having one.

Neither!You seem to be under the mistaken impression the letters of recommendation are paper documents. At least in the US, actual paper recommendation letters haven’t been the norm for at least twenty years. Letters of recommendation are almost always electronic files, usually in .docx or.pdf format, which are submitted electronically by their authors—most often by uploading them to a web site, but sometimes via email. There is no need to print the letter.Not even to sign it. Nobody cares if recommendation letters are actually signed. The authenticity of the letter is guaranteed by the fact that the author uploaded it themselves. But most of the letters I read are signed electronically (using a scanned image of the writer’s actual signature, not that fancy Adobe stuff).In principle, one could write a recommendation letter by hand on paper and then scan it, or even write it by hand on a tablet computer. But I’ve never seen a letter written that way.